Archive for the ‘Corporate Finance’ Category

Mad Glee-actica: The Virtues of Extreme Recycling

posted by Jonathan Lipson

I don’t watch much TV.  So, I am hardly the person to make strong claims about its quality or trends.  That said, I find it fascinating that three of the best shows of the past few years—Battlestar Galactica, Madmen, and Glee—share a really odd structural feature:  They have all taken ridiculously bad ideas from cringe-able eras and turned them around completely, made them not only fresh, but evocative, disturbing, intriguing.

They are, in short, evidence of the virtues of extreme recycling.

Just imagine the pitch meeting for Galactica:  We’ll take what has to have been one of the dumbest pop-culture packing peanuts ever and make it stronger, faster, better:  How about an allegory about civil liberties and faith after 9/11 using Cylons and vats of goo?

Or what about Madmen:  Let’s explore the most virulent cancers on our culture with lovingly pornographic attention to detail, to demonstrate the complex symbiosis among banality, beauty, evil and exculpation.  Madmen is the money shot of commodity fetishism, proving once again the truth of Chomsky’s admonition that if you want to learn what’s wrong with capitalism, don’t read The Nation, read the Wall Street Journal.

And Glee?  Well, all I can say is:  Don’t Stop Believing.

Which may lead you to this question:  No one really takes the “and everything else” part of CoOps’s desktop mantra seriously, so what the frak does this have to do with law? Read the rest of this post »

  November 2, 2010 at 10:25 am  Tags: Bankruptcy, battlestar galactica, Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, dodd-frank, glee, good faith, lender liability, madmen, shadow bankruptcy  Posted in: Bankruptcy, Contract Law & Beyond, Corporate Finance, Just for Fun, Movies & Television   Print This Post   One Comment

Rule of Law in Russia

posted by Frank Pasquale

This presentation by Bill Browder at the Stanford Graduate School of Business is a pretty astonishing account of the Russian economy over the past two decades. I am familiar with the usual story of oligarch profiteering, but Browder’s experience shows how even the ostensibly sound legal arrangements of today can quickly unfold into a nightmare for investors. As the Stanford GSB news puts it,

Browder soared to fame and fortune investing in Russian equities amid the chaos and corruption of the post-Soviet economy. His hallmark: finding hidden values in Russian companies and driving up their share prices by exposing corporate malfeasance and mismanagement. His widely publicized campaigns for shareholder rights and corporate governance helped propel the Hermitage Fund from $25 million in 1996 to $4 billion a decade later. But eventually the U.S.-born financier ran afoul of the Russian government, which banned him from the country in 2005 as a threat to national security.

According to Browder, “Anyone who would make a long-term investment in Russia right now, almost at any valuation, is completely out of their mind. . . .My situation is not unusual. For every me, there are 100 others suffering in silence.” And for a “bigger picture” presentation about the “disembedded markets” and the types of forces Browder was a victim of, Nancy Fraser’s Storrs Lecture podcast on “Predatory Protections, Tragic Tradeoffs, and Dangerous Liaisons: Dilemmas of Justice in the Context of Capitalist Crisis” is also well worth listening to.

  October 28, 2010 at 10:16 am   Posted in: Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Corruption, Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Inequality, Securities Regulation   Print This Post   One Comment

Will Charles Ferguson be Our Ferdinand Pecora? (Review of Inside Job)

posted by Frank Pasquale

In his post on Michael Perino’s book Hellhound of Wall Street, Lawrence Cunningham observes that “Our predecessors were fortunate to have someone like Ferdinand Pecora to uncover top-secret financial shenanigans. No such person appears in our midst.”

It’s a tragic situation, especially because there are some real truth tellers out there—Yves Smith, Mike Konczal, Michael Greenberger, and many affiliates of the Roosevelt Institute come to mind. The difference between Pecora’s time and ours is a fragmented and manipulated media that a) can barely follow a complex financial story for more than a few hours, and b) fastidiously counterbalances every account of a Wall Street misdeed with some “expert” assuring us that it’s just business as usual in an industry that’s way too complicated for ordinary people to understand.

Charles Ferguson’s compelling film Inside Job steps in for a phantom mass media. Every citizen should be conversant with the basic narrative Ferguson puts together. Andrew Sheng, Chief Advisor to the China Banking Regulatory Commission, puts it in a nutshell: there was massive private gain in the US financial sector leading to massive public loss. Looking back, we might have all been better off if the finance tycoons profiled in the film had simply demanded hundreds of millions of dollars directly from the government back in 2000, and retired to Capri.

Instead, these deci- and centimillionaires helped build up the Rube Goldberg contraption of derivative deregulation, CDO’s, and CDS’s Ferguson describes. Fortunately, the film concisely explains that farrago in a way that will both educate the uninitiated and intrigue those who’ve read some books on the crisis. The film’s real contribution lies in four arguments it makes.
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  October 11, 2010 at 12:30 am   Posted in: Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Corruption   Print This Post   4 Comments

On the Colloquy: The Credit Crisis, Refusal-to-Deal, Procreation & the Constitution, and Open Records vs. Death-Related Privacy Rights

posted by Northwestern University Law Review

This summer started off with a three part series from Professor Olufunmilayo B. Arewa looking at the credit crisis and possible changes that would focus on averting future market failures, rather than continuing to create regulations that only address past ones.  Part I of Prof. Arewa’s looks at the failure of risk management within the financial industry.  Part II analyzes the regulatory failures that contributed to the credit crisis as well as potential reforms.  Part III concludes by addressing recent legislation and whether it will actually help solve these very real problems.

Next, Professors Alan Devlin and Michael Jacobs take on an issue at the “heart of a highly divisive, international debate over the proper application of antitrust laws” – what should be done when a dominant firm refuses to share its intellectual property, even at monopoly prices.

Professor Carter Dillard then discussed the circumstances in which it may be morally permissible, and possibly even legally permissible, for a state to intervene and prohibit procreation.

Rounding out the summer was Professor Clay Calvert’s article looking at journalists’ use of open record laws and death-related privacy rights.  Calvert questions whether journalists have a responsibility beyond simply reporting dying words and graphic images.  He concludes that, at the very least, journalists should listen to the impact their reporting has on surviving family members.

  September 5, 2010 at 1:15 pm  Tags: Antitrust, Constitutional Law, copyright, discrimination, financial crisis, free speech, Intellectual Property, Privacy, trademark  Posted in: Antitrust, Bioethics, Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Corporate Finance, First Amendment, Intellectual Property, Privacy, Securities, Securities Regulation   Print This Post   No Comments

The Question Concerning Finance: Party Like It’s 1929? Or Prepare Like It’s 1957?

posted by Frank Pasquale

Another day, another story of Wall Street’s failure to allocate capital responsibly. Today’s installment appears on ProPublica, and describes how “Wall Street bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history:”

Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses: They created fake demand.

A ProPublica analysis shows for the first time the extent to which banks — primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others — bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged. The products they were buying and selling were at the heart of the 2008 meltdown — collections of mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs.

As the housing boom began to slow in mid-2006, investors became skittish about the riskier parts of those investments. So the banks created — and ultimately provided most of the money for — new CDOs. Those new CDOs bought the hard-to-sell pieces of the original CDOs. The result was a daisy chain that solved one problem but created another: Each new CDO had its own risky pieces. Banks created yet other CDOs to buy those. . . .Because of Wall Street’s machinations, more mortgages had been granted to ever-shakier borrowers.

The article explains the details of the deals, whose byzantine structures should be numbingly familiar to anyone who’s read ProPublica’s earlier work on Magnetar, or chapter 9 of Yves Smith’s book Econned. Smith calculated that, “if you look at the non-synthetic component, every dollar in mezz ABS CDO equity that funded cash bonds created $533 in subprime demand” (Econned, 261). (If mezz ABS CDO means nothing to you, I highly recommend Smith’s blog, or John Lanchester’s I.O.U., the most stylishly written of the “crisis” books.)

Behind all the reticulated swaps of risk and reward, in article after article, the crash of 2008 is boiling down to a familiar story: endless leverage designed to support ever more fee-generating deals. Read the rest of this post »

  August 27, 2010 at 9:19 pm   Posted in: Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Corruption, Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics, Technology   Print This Post   7 Comments

Book Review: Bank’s From Sword to Shield: The Transformation of the Corporate Income Tax, 1861 to Present

posted by Samuel Brunson

  July 23, 2010 at 12:08 am   Posted in: Book Reviews, Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Tax   Print This Post   One Comment

Goldman’s $550 Million SEC Settlement

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

The SEC announced this afternoon that Goldman Sachs agreed to settle, for $550 million, the civil lawsuit against it alleging materially misleading disclosures in circulars for some mortgage-backed securities it hawked.  As I wrote on this blog, in a post of April 19 called SEC v. Goldman as a Simple Case, the case was simple. 

In a bruising Consent to a Final Judgment in the federal case against it, Goldman acknowledges the point I made that makes the case simple.  Its marketing circular said the reference portfolio was “selected by” the independent firm, ACA Management LLC, when in fact Paulson & Co. Inc., an interested party, played a role in that selection. 

Within 30 days, Goldman must pay investors it misled by the marketing materials: $150 million to Deutsche Bank and $100 million to the Royal Bank of Scotland (known as ABN AMRO Bank when it bought Goldman’s securities).  It must pay another $300 million to the SEC.  

The SEC’s press release headlined that this amount set a ”record” for the agency and is non-trivial even for a firm of Goldman’s size.   Its enforcement chief, Bob Khuzami, boasted that “half a billion dollars is the largest penalty ever assessed against a financial services firm in the history of the SEC.”

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  July 15, 2010 at 5:59 pm   Posted in: Corporate Finance, Current Events, Securities, Securities Regulation   Print This Post   2 Comments

Here Comes FinReg

posted by Frank Pasquale

Via Ezra Klein’s Wonkbook (definitely one of my favorite morning emails), a variety of takes on what’s in the financial reform bill:

1. From Deloitte’s 12-page summary:

Because the new U.S. law is complex, it can be helpful to remind ourselves that its underlying purpose is relatively simple and has two powerful strands: 1. ‘De-risk’ the financial system by constraining individual organizations’ risk-taking activities and capturing a broader set of organizations’, including the so-called “shadow” banking system, in the regulatory net 2. Enhance consumer protections. . . .For example, the need for “arm’s-length” swap desk affiliates combined with the move from over- the-counter to exchange trading for derivatives, tighter constraints on leverage and risk-taking, and higher liquidity requirements imply lower profit margins in future from those activities.

Some estimates I’ve seen have estimated the profit margins might be around 15% lower.

2. Simon Johnson on the Kanjorski Amendment as a “new kind of antitrust:”

Effective size caps on banks were imposed by the banking reforms of the 1930’s, and there was an effort to maintain such restrictions in the Riegle-Neal Act of 1994. But all of these limitations fell by the wayside during the wholesale deregulation of the past 15 years. Now, however, a new form of antitrust arrives – in the form of the Kanjorski Amendment, whose language was embedded in the Dodd-Frank bill. Once the bill becomes law, federal regulators will have the right and the responsibility to limit the scope of big banks and, as necessary, break them up when they pose a “grave risk” to financial stability.

Read the rest of this post »

  July 15, 2010 at 9:42 am   Posted in: Antitrust, Consumer Protection Law, Corporate Finance, Corruption, Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, Securities, Securities Regulation   Print This Post   2 Comments

Tricks of the Traders

posted by Frank Pasquale

Loans and securities are not merely products. While progressive forces can win some political battles by deploying the product metaphor, it obscures more than it illuminates. Consider the practice of “high-frequency trading.”

Matt Krantz discusses the ways in which automation in the finance sector can leave ordinary investors high and dry:

Not only are the markets completely computerized, more than half of the market’s volume is churned by computers programmed to spot certain patterns in trading. These machines see stocks not as securities used by companies to raise money, but rather, symbols, numbers and bits that are traded, swapped and exchanged.

And now, traders say, humans are responding to machines rather than the other way around. Increasingly, too, the machines are reacting to each other, trying to second-guess what their next moves might be on how to take advantage of an edge that might be gone in milliseconds.

As Keynes might have predicted, we have “reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.” The machines are perhaps devoted to “practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.” But there’s a twist: part of the investment game now appears to be a falsification of (or at least fake-outs via) data on such opinions:
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  July 11, 2010 at 7:22 pm   Posted in: Corporate Finance, Current Events, Cyberlaw, Economic Analysis of Law, Securities, Technology   Print This Post   3 Comments

The Value of Finance

posted by Frank Pasquale

Brad Delong and Stephen Cohen’s work The End of Influence illuminates the role of law & policy in shaping the US economy. They calculate that, over the past 15 years,

the United States has half-consciously re-shaped its economy. The country shifted some 7 percent of its GDP out of manufacturing and added some 7 percent of GDP in the expansion of finance, insurance, and real estate transactions. . . . The communities of engineering practice and innovative technological development do move and emerge elsewhere as you shift labor from real engineering, which calculates stresses in materials and quantum tunneling in doped semiconductors, into financial engineering, which calculated delta-hedge decay and vega convexity for synthetic securities. It also means that you must create more and more debt so that other nations have the dollars to accumulate and not balance their trade—and yours.

So what was the end result of that big shift of resources into the finance sector? Some might argue we were on our way to becoming a “virtual state,” the highest link in the financial food chain. Clive Dilnot offers an alternative perspective:

For the banks and financial houses of Wall St. and the City what mattered was not the creation of wealth . . . but the extraction of realizable value from capital that could be made to flow through the institution. This explains the ‘relentless’ drive for expanded balance sheets ‘at all costs’—and for expansion on both sides of the balance sheet, assets and liabilities alike. Value is here a cull. Innovation is creating the conditions under which, and from which, immediate surplus can be won from flows of capital.

However the financial reform legislation turns out, it is unlikely to do much to stop that dynamic.

  July 5, 2010 at 8:58 pm   Posted in: Corporate Finance, Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, Politics   Print This Post   One Comment

Are We There Yet? Driving The Financial Reform Bill Home

posted by Kristin Johnson

This morning, at 5:39am, a conference committee comprised of 43 lawmakers from the House and the Senate agreed upon a final version of the financial reform bill. The bill is expected to pass in both chambers of Congress and to be signed into law on July 4th by President Obama. As anticipated, the final version reflects critical compromises that may alter the bill’s ability to mitigate the systemic risk in the financial system that inspired  the bill’s creation.

Earlier versions of the bill included provisions proposed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and Senator Blanche Lincoln. These provisions aimed to prohibit federally insured banks from engaging in riskier investment activities, such as investments in hedge funds or private equity funds, and required banks to limit and isolate their proprietary trading activities and to discontinue their origination and trading of nontraditional or exotic investment products, such as derivatives contracts. In the face of strong and well-financed opposition, the conference committee has adopted a less restrictive version of the proposed regulation.

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  June 25, 2010 at 5:24 pm   Posted in: Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Securities Regulation   Print This Post   No Comments

Recommended Reading: The Buyout of America

posted by Frank Pasquale

As lawmakers squabble over the “carried interest” tax rate, it’s nice to find a big picture overview of some of the economic activity they’re discussing. I recently read Josh Kosman’s book The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Will Cause the Next Great Credit Crisis, and I highly recommend it to our readers. Kosman painstakingly describes the byzantine financial maneuvers behind marquee private equity firms which bought “more than three thousand American companies from 2000-2008.” He describes in detail how they resist transparency (164) and “hurt their businesses competitively, limit their growth, cut jobs without reinvesting the savings, and generate mediocre returns” (195). The recipe for high earnings is simple: the firms “get large fees up front and are largely divorced from their results if their transactions fail” (195).

Like Kwak and Johnson’s account in 13 Bankers, Kosman offers a political economy account of private equity’s favored treatment by government. As he notes,

[F]our of the past eight Treasury Secretaries joined the PE industry . . . . and they have significant influence in Washington. President Bill Clinton, and both President Bushes, have also advised PE firms or worked for their companies. . . . KKR retained former Democratic House majority leader Richard Gephardt as a lobbyist and hired former RNC chairman Kenneth Mehlman as head of global public affairs. (196)

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  June 17, 2010 at 11:10 am   Posted in: Book Reviews, Corporate Finance, Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Inequality, Politics, Securities, Uncategorized   Print This Post   4 Comments

Volcker on the Crisis

posted by Frank Pasquale

One of the quiet heroes of current debates on financial reform is Paul Volcker, a veritable Cincinnatus who has been asking the right questions throughout. Here are a few of his queries from a recent NYRB essay:

Has the contribution of the modern world of finance to economic growth become so critical as to support remuneration to its participants beyond any earlier experience and expectations? Does the past profitability of and the value added by the financial industry really now justify profits amounting to as much as 35 to 40 percent of all profits by all US corporations? Can the truly enormous rise in the use of derivatives, complicated options, and highly structured financial instruments really have made a parallel contribution to economic efficiency? If so, does analysis of economic growth and productivity over the past decade or so indicate visible acceleration of growth or benefits flowing down to the average American worker who even before the crisis had enjoyed no increase in real income?

I highly recommend the rest of the essay. Volcker subtly works in some of the substantive dimensions of economic reform that are necessary to a sustainable economic recovery. If advice like his is not taken, it becomes all the more likely that more radical alternatives will gain traction.

  June 16, 2010 at 7:49 pm   Posted in: Corporate Finance, Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Inequality   Print This Post   No Comments

GW’s Junior Scholar Workshop and Prizes

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

As anticipated, the Center for Law, Economics and Finance at George Washington University Law School (C-LEAF)  has formally announced its first annual Junior Faculty Business and Financial Law Workshop and Junior Faculty Scholarship Prizes.    The Inaugural Workshop will be held and Prizes awarded on April 1-2, 2011, at GW Law School in Washington, DC.

Up to ten papers will be chosen from those submitted for presentation at the Workshop. At the Workshop, one or more senior scholars will comment on each paper, followed by general discussion of each paper among all participants. The Workshop audience will include invited junior scholars, faculty from GW’s Law School and Business School, faculty from other institutions, and invited guests.

At the conclusion of the Workshop, up to three papers will be awarded Junior Faculty Scholarship Prizes, of $3,000, $2,000, and $1,000, respectively. Chosen papers will be featured on C-LEAF’s website as part of its Working Paper Series. In addition to participating in the Workshop, all scholars selected to present at the  Workshop will be invited to become Fellows of C-LEAF. Read the rest of this post »

  June 8, 2010 at 1:00 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Articles and Books, Conferences, Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Securities, Securities Regulation, Tax   Print This Post   One Comment

Nonlinear Theory Explains May 6 Market Break

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

One week after stock markets dropped 10% in half an hour, regulators still confess bewilderment yet equally resolve never to let it happen again.  No one at the SEC or CFTC or any of the exchanges has been able to identify a particular cause of the flash crash.  They do say the precipitous decline was magnified by how some trading platforms, like the old-fashioned New York Stock Exchange, halted trading when the downward spiral began while electronic trading platforms did not.

A consensus appears to believe that this worsened the spiral because trades could still be made elsewhere but with fewer participants, in a thinner market. Adherents think the cure is obvious: such trading breaks should be adopted across all trading platforms so if there is ever any significant decline in price, all trading would halt.  I respectfully dissent.

This is a replay of the 1987 stock market crash: no one could figure out why it happened so everyone decided such circuit breakers were the thing to do about it.   The consensus is likely to be just as wrong today as it was wrong then, based on an alternative view, which I laid out in my 1994 GW Law Review article, From Random Walks to Chaotic Crashes: The Linear Genealogy of the Efficient Capital Market Hypothesis. Those seeking an explanation for the 1987 crash and last week’s flash crash presuppose things about stock markets and pricing that may simply be false. Read the rest of this post »

  May 13, 2010 at 2:30 pm   Posted in: Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, Securities, Securities Regulation   Print This Post   One Comment

Breaking Up Behemoth Banks

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Thanks to banking industry mistakes and government’s orchestration of its rescue, the country now has ten banks that together command some $10 trillion in assets, roughly equal to nearly 70% of the country’s gross domestic product. Pending legislation would break those up into a total of about 36, each still commanding about $285 billion in assets apiece—larger than the next largest bank is now.

That break up would eliminate the continuing threat to the US economic and political system posed by banks deemed so big that government lavishes trillions in aid to avoid letting them fail—at enormous cost to ordinary citizens and the real economy. It is by far the cleanest and most reliable solution to the manifest havoc massive banks wreak, not addressable by any pending technocratic tinkering like better regulation or capital requirements.

The break-up idea is not as radical as it is controversial, due to foes of ex ante legal constraints on private power.  All passage of the legislation would mean is substantially a return to the scale and distribution of the US banking system as of the mid-1990s, when no bank commanded assets exceeding more than a few percent of GDP. In important part, as the lists below suggest, the conglomerate mergers of the past two decades that caused this massive concentration of economic and political power would be reversed. Read the rest of this post »

  May 5, 2010 at 1:49 pm   Posted in: Antitrust, Consumer Protection Law, Corporate Finance, Current Events   Print This Post   6 Comments

Banks, Bankers, and the New Political Economy

posted by Frank Pasquale

As post-mortems of the financial crisis proliferate, it’s helpful to keep an eye on some foundational causes. Michael Lewis recently commented that “the people who squandered the most money paid themselves the most”—and continue to do so. We’ve all heard about agency problems, but rarely are they as crisply illustrated as in this post by James Kwak:

[The hedge fund] Magnetar made the Wall Street banks look like chumps. [In] one deal . . . Magnetar put up $10 million in equity and then shorted $1 billion of AAA-rated bonds issued by the CDO. It turned out that in this deal, JPMorgan Chase, the investment bank, actually held onto those AAA-rated bonds and eventually took a loss of $880 million. This was in exchange for about $20 million in up-front fees it earned.

But who’s the chump? Sure, JPMorgan Chase the bank lost $880 million. But of that $20 million in fees, about $10 million was paid out in compensation (investment banks pay out about half of their net revenues as compensation), much of it to the bankers who did the deal. JPMorgan’s bankers did just fine, despite having placed a ticking time bomb on their own bank’s balance sheet. Here’s the second lesson: the idea that bankers’ pay is based on their performance is also hogwash. (The idea that their pay is based on their net contribution to society is even more absurd.)

I was recently at a conference on “Too Big to Fail” banks organized by Zephyr Teachout, and several experts explained how the tail of massive compensation was wagging the dog of societal capital allocation. William K. Black‘s theory of “control fraud” is one of many efforts to illuminate the persistent conflicts of interest between banks, bankers, and investors, but one needn’t designate any of these conflicts “fraudulent” in order to see how socially destructive they have become. Rather, pulling back to see the big picture—from the lens of political economy—illuminates the key drivers of the crisis. As Kwak notes, “the crisis was no accident: it was the result of the financial sector’s ability to use its political power to engineer a favorable regulatory environment for itself.” Thinkers across the political spectrum—from Kling to Kuttner—can recognize the critical role of political connectedness in driving bankers’ compensation.
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  April 13, 2010 at 11:42 pm   Posted in: Antitrust, Corporate Finance, Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics   Print This Post   2 Comments

SCOTUS Chides Posner/Easterbrook in Jones v. Harris

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

In a gentle rebuke to two famous academic judges, Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook, today the US Supreme Court told them a debate they were airing in a recent case was not for federal judges but for Congress.

The Court, in Jones v. Harris, unanimously vacated as erroneous Easterbrook’s opinion that went out of its way to disagree with well-settled judicial interpretations of a relatively simple federal statute. Posner’s contending opinion engaged directly with the economic and market theories on which Easterbrook drew, both judges wrongly making debate out of the wisdom rather than the meaning of the statute.

The statute says an adviser to mutual funds is “deemed to be a fiduciary with respect to the receipt of compensation for services.”   For thirty years, virtually all federal courts take that to mean adviser fees cannot be so disproportionate to services rendered as to indicate lack of an arms-length sort of bargain.    Testing that requires considering all relevant factors.

The Court affirmed that interpretation and test as correct, in an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito. Easterbrook erred when instead saying the fiduciary duty language required only that advisers disclose fees and that no other factor is relevant. The Court indicates that his dissertation on competition in the mutual fund industry and theories of market behavior is irrelevant to federal court business in the case.

Posner’s opinion, in the form of a dissent from the Circuit’s refusal to rehear the case en banc, engaged Easterbrook directly on economic theories and views of market efficacy, including debating empirical academic studies reaching opposite conclusions. The Supreme Court rebuked both, saying their job was to apply the statute not debate its wisdom. Read the rest of this post »

  March 30, 2010 at 2:53 pm   Posted in: Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Economic Analysis of Law, Jurisprudence, Securities, Securities Regulation, Supreme Court   Print This Post   2 Comments

You, Lehman’s Re-Po Magic, and Ernst & Young

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Ernst & Young, one of four remaining large auditing firms, allegedly botched its financial audits of Lehman Brothers, the bankrupt investment banking firm. E&Y responds that its audits met legal and professional requirements.

My view, reported in today’s New York Times, wonders, suggesting E&Y offers a “technical compliance defense,” when what’s needed is an objective judgment, based on professional skepticism, of whether financials provide a fair presentation.

Though the allegations sound esoteric, it is easy to translate them into simple terms.  When considering the following analogue between Lehman’s deals and your personal finance, think about how an independent accountant would assess what I suppose you are doing.

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  March 15, 2010 at 11:56 am   Posted in: Accounting, Corporate Finance, Current Events, Securities Regulation   Print This Post   One Comment

SEC Should Calm Markets, Ahead of Possible Audit Crisis

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

If you thought the 2008 credit crisis that temporarily froze global debt markets wrought havoc, watch out for the next shoe to drop.  At stake is the viability of global equity and other financial markets that could freeze if one of the four large auditing firms goes extinct.

And the existence of one of them, Ernst & Young, is threatened, as it faces the prospect of billion dollar liability for botched audits of Lehman Brothers, the defunct investment bank struggling in bankruptcy. It is an eerie echo of the fate of erstwhile big auditing firm Arthur Andersen, which dissolved after its culpability in 2001’s Enron fraud emerged.

Today, only four auditing firms have the resources and expertise to audit the vast majority of thousands of large public corporations. If one of those dissolved, its clients would have to scramble to find a replacement. Some of the remaining three lack requisite expertise for some of those corporations and others would be disqualified from auditing due to consulting work they do for them.

The result would be hundreds, possibly thousands, of large corporations who could not get their financial statements audited as required by US federal securities law. Stock markets could go berserk, along with other financial markets. The costs now, of moving from four firms to three, would dwarf those incurred when Andersen’s dissolution moved the total from five to four.

It does not appear that the US government, specifically its Securities and Exchange Commission, has any plans to deal with this prospect. It should. And it should announce them promptly to get ahead of any market crisis the failure of E&Y, or of the other three, would wreak. 

If not, the credit crisis of 2008 will look mild in comparison. After all, the credit crisis was readily addressed by government pumping enormous amounts of capital to rejuvenate liquidity; an auditing crisis cannot by solved by throwing money at it. Read the rest of this post »

  March 15, 2010 at 9:22 am   Posted in: Accounting, Bankruptcy, Corporate Finance, Current Events, Securities Regulation   Print This Post   One Comment

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